Church Lab "Secret" Artificial Genome Meeting

thescientist |  Harvard Medical School’s George Church and his collaborators invited some 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to Boston last week (May 10) to discuss the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize entire large genomes in vitro. According to a statement Church provided to STAT News, such an endeavor could represent “the next chapter in our understanding of the blueprint of life.”

While the subject is an exciting one—on a smaller scale, Craig Venter’s group has synthesized the 1-million-base-pair genome of Mycoplasma mycoides—critics immediately took issue with the fact that this meeting was not open to the press. “This idea is an enormous step for the human species, and it shouldn’t be discussed only behind closed doors,” Northwestern University’s Laurie Zoloth told STAT News. She and Stanford University bioengineer Drew Endy published an article in Cosmos documenting their disapproval of the private nature of the meeting.

Church told STAT News that the original intention was to make the meeting open, but in anticipation of an imminent, high-profile publication on this project, he and his collaborators had to respect the journal’s embargo. However, Endy tweeted a photo of what appeared to be a message from the meeting organizers stating that they chose not to invite media “because we want everyone to speak freely and candidly without concerns about being misquoted or misinterpreted.”

Übermensch smile as you humans have that conversation...,

techcrunch |  A species-wide conversation on our future has never before been carried out. We didn’t do it at the dawn of the industrial or nuclear ages for understandable reasons, even though we might have avoided some terrible outcomes if we had.

With a growing percentage of the world population connected to the information grid in one way or another, we now have a limited opportunity to avoid making the same mistake and begin laying a foundation for decisions we will need to collectively make in the future. Given the political divisiveness of this issue, the window will not stay open long.

Such a conversation would involve connecting individuals and communities around the world with different backgrounds and perspectives and varying degrees of education in an interconnected web of dialogue.

It would link people adamantly opposed to human genetic enhancement, those who may see it as a panacea, and the vast majority of everyone else who has no idea this transformation is already underway. It would highlight the almost unimaginable potential of these technologies but also raise the danger that opponents could mobilize their efforts and undermine the most promising work to cure cancers and eliminate disease.

But the alternative is far worse. If a relatively small number of even very well intentioned people unleash a human genetic revolution that will ultimately touch most everyone and alter our species’ evolutionary trajectory without informed, meaningful, and early input from others, the backlash against the genetic revolution will overwhelm its monumental potential for good.

Homo Sapiens of the world, let us begin this conversation.

brainjacking: the future of security for neural implants

boingboing |  In a new scientific review paper published in World Neurosurgery, a group of Oxford neurosurgeons and scientists round up a set of dire, terrifying warnings about the way that neural implants are vulnerable to networked attacks. 

Most of the article turns on deep brain stimulation devices, which can be used to stimulate or suppress activity in different parts of the brain, already used to treat some forms of mental illness, chronic pain and other disorders. The researchers round up a whole dystopia's worth of potential attacks on these implants, including tampering with the victim's reward system "to exert substantial control over a patient's behaviour"; pain attacks that induce "severe pain in these patients"; and attacks on impulse control that could induce "Mania, hypersexuality, and pathological gambling." 

The researchers discuss some of the ways in which the (dismal) state of medical implant security could be improved. I recently co-authored a set of comments to the FDA asking them to require manufacturers to promise not to use the DMCA to intimidate and silence security researchers who come forward with warnings about dangerous defects in their products. 

The paper has a delightful bibliography, which cites books like Neuromancer, anime like Ghost in the Shell, as well as papers in Nature, Brain, The Journal of Neurosurgery, and Brain Stimulation.

more material than materialism...,

NYTimes |  Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the existence of consciousness: They become “eliminativists.”

This amazing phenomenon (the denial of the existence of consciousness) is a subject for another time. The present point — it’s worth repeating many times — is that no one has to react in either of these ways. All they have to do is grasp the fundamental respect in which we don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical. It’s worth adding that one can fully accept this even if one is unwilling to agree with Russell that in having conscious experience we thereby know something about the intrinsic nature of physical reality.

So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn’t be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. But physics doesn’t do any such thing. It’s not the physics picture of matter that’s the problem; it’s the ordinary everyday picture of matter. It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness.

the malthusian killer-ape crew moves to back Chomsky into a corner

declineofempire |  Chomsky's views on all the subjects he's talked about for decades—power politics, elite repression of The People, elite-controlled media, socioeconomic arrangements, and, recently, climate change—are vacuous unless he has based those views on some theory (or partial theory) of how humans work at a fundamental level (human nature).

And that's not true of Chomsky only; that's generally true. If this vaunted "intellectual" is so damn smart, why hasn't he realized this? Why hasn't he worked on the Human Nature problem as it pertains to, for example, the human response to climate change, instead of lecturing us over and over again about elite-controlled media or unreported, U.S.-supported genocides?

Aren't genocides and elite-controlled media manifestations of aspects of Human Nature? And what about the human response to climate change? If these are not manifestations of human nature, then what the fuck are we talking about? Here's my view.

For example, you can't talk about free market (albeit corrupt) capitalism versus anti-hierarchical anarcho-syndicalist blah blah blah (Chomsky's preferred arrangement) unless your views are based on how humans work, on what is possible for humans to achieve. Otherwise, you're talking out your ass. I discussed this foundational point at the very beginning of the first Flatland essay.

What I also explained in the beginning of that first Flatland essay goes as follows: in order talk out your ass, you're forced to assume a "blank slate" view of Human Nature which implicitly posits that humans are infinitely malleable (our behavior is completely determined by our social and physical environment).

The "blank slate"' in effect says that "anything goes" as far as human socioeconomic arrangements go, to pick just one example. Now, we might ask a simple question here: why is the world dominated by market-based (though inevitably corrupt) capitalist systems instead of anarcho-syndicalist blah blah blah? Is all this some kind of mistake?

Well, if you ask Chomsky, he would argue, at least implicitly, that the world-as-it-is is indeed some kind of mistake, and humans can fix it (though not easily) by inventing some kind of new sociopolitical system which would be better in some undefined way. Chomsky has dedicated his life to this viewpoint, despite clear and overwhelming evidence that humans do not have the capacity for change that he imagines.

At this point you might ask Chomsky why those malevolent elites (hierarchical kleptocracies) he goes on and on about have always existed (and still do) in all large, complex human societies. Apparently, this is a "mistake" humans have made over and over again for the last 6000 years or so, ever since large complex human societies first appeared.

organic competency development: can occupy, resist, produce actually work?

topdocumentaryfilms |  We heard rumors of a new kind of economy emerging in Argentina. With hundreds of factories closing, waves of workers were locking themselves inside and running the workplaces on their own, with no bosses. Where we come from, a closed factory is just an inevitable effect of a model, the end of a story. In Argentina today, it's just the beginning. In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave.

All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - The Take - has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. In the wake of Argentina's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, Latin America's most prosperous middle class finds itself in a ghost town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. The Forja auto plant lies dormant until its former employees take action.

They're part of a daring new movement of workers who are occupying bankrupt businesses and creating jobs in the ruins of the failed system. But Freddy, the president of the new worker's co-operative, and Lalo, the political powerhouse from the Movement of Recovered Companies, know that their success is far from secure. Like every workplace occupation, they have to run the gauntlet of courts, cops and politicians who can either give their project legal protection or violently evict them from the factory.

The story of the workers' struggle is set against the dramatic backdrop of a crucial presidential election in Argentina, in which the architect of the economic collapse, Carlos Menem, is the front-runner. His cronies, the former owners, are circling: if he wins, they'll take back the companies that the movement has worked so hard to revive. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.

venezuela - lack of organic community competency development or victim of economic hitmen?

zerohedge |  As we reported yesterday, Maduro on Friday night declared a 60-day state of emergency due to what he called plots from Venezuela and the United States to subvert him. He did not provide specifics. 

As Reuters adds today, "the measure shows Maduro is panicking as a push for a recall referendum against him gains traction with tired, frustrated Venezuelans, opposition leaders said during a protest in Caracas."

"We're talking about a desperate president who is putting himself on the margin of legality and constitutionality," said Democratic Unity coalition leader Jesus Torrealba, adding Maduro was losing support within his own bloc. 

"If this state of emergency is issued without consulting the National Assembly, we would technically be talking about a self-coup," he told hundreds of supporters who waved Venezuelan flags and chanted "he's going to fall." 

The people's will was already made clear late last year when the opposition won control of the National Assembly in a December election, propelled by voter anger over product shortages, raging inflation that has annihilated salaries, and rampant violent crime, but the legislature has been routinely undercut by the Supreme Court. The lit fuse is therefore entirely in the hands of the increasingly more desperate people. Protests are on the rise and a key poll shows nearly 70% of Venezuelans now say Maduro must go this year. 

Maduro has vowed to see his term through, however, blasting opposition politicians as coup-mongering elitists seeking to emulate the impeachment of fellow leftist Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. 

Saying trouble-makers were fomenting violence to justify a foreign invasion, Maduro on Saturday hinted that a violent crackdown on enemies, both foreign and domestic, may be imminent when he ordered military exercises for next weekend. 

"We're going to tell imperialism and the international right that the people are present, with their farm instruments in one hand and a gun in the other... to defend this sacred land," he boomed at a rally. He added the government would take over idled factories, and in the process "radicalize the revolution:"

"Comrades, I am ready to hand over to communal power the factories that some conservative big wigs in this country have stopped. An idled factory is a factory handed over to the people. We are going to do it, fuck it!"

Critics of Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, say he should instead focus on people's urgent needs. 

"There will be a social explosion if Maduro doesn't let the recall referendum happen," said protester Marisol Dos Santos, 34, an office worker at a supermarket where she says some 800 people queue up daily.But the opposition fear authorities are trying to delay a referendum until 2017, when the presidency would fall to the vice president, a post currently held by Socialist Party loyalist Aristobulo Isturiz. 

"If you block this democratic path we don't know what might happen in this country," two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles said at the demonstration. 

"Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any given moment." 

no chip too foul to use in the political-economic game for control of the world's largest oil reserves..,

NYTimes |  This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country. Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into looting. The bolívar, the country’s currency, is nearly worthless.

The crisis is aggravated by a political feud between Venezuela’s leftists, who control the presidency, and their rivals in congress. The president’s opponents declared a humanitarian crisis in January, and this month passed a law that would allow Venezuela to accept international aid to prop up the health care system.

“This is criminal that we can sit in a country with this much oil, and people are dying for lack of antibiotics,” says Oneida Guaipe, a lawmaker and former hospital union leader.

But Mr. Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez, went on television and rejected the effort, describing the move as a bid to undermine him and privatize the hospital system.

“I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one,” Mr. Maduro said.

Late last fall, the aging pumps that supplied water to the University of the Andes Hospital exploded. They were not repaired for months.

So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.

Even in the capital, only two of nine operating rooms are functioning at the J. M. de los Ríos Children’s Hospital.

venezuela's profitable elite-engineered collapse and anarchy...,

telesur |  In 2004 and 2005, after winning the recall referendum against him, Chavez launched an offensive to boost local production. “Endogenous development” went hand in hand with declaring that the Bolivarian revolution was heading toward socialism. Land reform began in earnest. Mission Vuelvan Caras began to train the urban poor in agricultural and other skills. Tens of thousands of cooperatives were set up. Almost all of these failed.

The reasons were many, but one of the most potent was that oil prices began to rise sharply. It was just so much easier to import everything, than to build a whole new system of production. And with more people consuming much more, there was a lot that needed to be imported.

This presented Venezuela's traditional elite with an unexpected opportunity. For they still owned most of the companies that did the importing. Since losing control over the state oil company, they had been desperate to claw back their share of its income.

They set about developing one of the greatest scams of all time. It was based on acquiring cheap dollars from the Central Bank for false or manipulated imports, and then speculating on the growing gap in exchange rates.

This is how it worked. Private importer Mr. A applies for US$ 1,000 to import 100 cases of groceries. This costs him 6,300 bolivars (at the government's main preferential rate of US$ 1.00 = Bs. 6.30, in place until earlier this year). Mr. A then has several options. He could decide actually to import all 100 cases. But instead of selling them to his wholesalers at a price based on what he paid, US$ 10 or Bs. 63 per case, he sells them at a price based on the illegal, parallel exchange rate (US$ 1.00 = Bs. 500.00, early last year), that is Bs. 5,000 per case. In other words, he makes a killing in bolivars. But it is much more likely that Mr. A imports only 50 cases, or less, which he sells in the same way and still makes a handsome profit. With the rest of the dollars he was given, 500 or more, he can do several things. He can change them back into bolivars at the parallel rate, but he'd probably rather keep them for a while offshore until the rate goes up even further. Or invest them in something else abroad. Or keep them in his own private dollar account for a rainy day. In other cases, Mr A didn't import anything at all. He basically stole all of the dollars.

Big private companies in Venezuela did the same thing on a much larger scale. In 2013, the then head of the Venezuelan Central Bank, Edmee Betancourt, said that the country had lost between $15 and $20 billion dollars the previous year through such fraudulent import deals. The Central Bank's own figures show that between 2003 and 2013, the Venezuelan private sector increased its holdings in foreign bank accounts by over US$ 122 billion, or almost 230 percent. In 2014, Chavistas campaigning for an audit of the public debt estimated the total amount lost over the same period through fake imports and similar mechanisms amounted to an incredible US$ 259 billion.

It is likely that many of the 750 offshore companies linked to Venezuela in the database released from the Panama Papers have been used to recycle this money.

Venezuela's largest food manufacturer, Polar, has interrupted production several times in recent weeks because, it says, the government hasn't given it the dollars it needs to import its raw materials. But over the years, Polar has been one of the very biggest recipients of preferential dollars for imports. And from somewhere it has found enough dollars to develop new production facilities in the United States and Colombia.

Ukraine 2014 - Brazil 2016: CIA Keeps Sock Puppets Molesting Community Valuables

zerohedge |  As it turns out, the Temer presidency may be nothing more than the latest manifestation of the US state department's implementation of yet another puppet government. We know this because earlier today, Wikileaks released evidence via a declassified cable that Brazil's new interim president was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military.

Wikileaks brought attention to two cables, one dated January 11, 2006, the other June 21, 2006. One shows a document sent from Sao Paolo, Brazil, to - among other recipients - the US Southern Command in Miami. In it, Temer discusses the political situation in Brazil during the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Regarding the 2006 elections, when Lula was re-elected, Temer shared scenarios in which his party (PMDB) would win the elections.  He declined to predict the race, however, but said there would be a run-off and that "anything could happen." 

Temer said the PMDB would elect between 10 and 15 governors that year, and that the party would have the most representatives in the Senate and thus the House of Representatives. This would mean that the elected president would have to report to PMDB rule.  "Whoever wins the presidential election will have to come to us to do anything," Temer reportedly said.

As a reminder, the last time the US instituted a puppet government, was in 2014 when in yet another "bloodless coup", the president of Ukraine was overthrown and replaced with a billionaire oligarch, a scenario comparable to the one in Brazil.

We don't have to remind readers that as a result of the Ukraine coup, relations between the US and Russia are multi-decade lows, the cold war is back and - as of yesterday, so is the nuclear arms race. We are curious what the consequence of yet another US state coup will be, this time in Latin America's largest country.

abolishing democracy in the world's fifth largest country...,

theintercept |  So if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation’s largest and most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with democracy altogether – after all, it keeps empowering candidates and policies you dislike – by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own, yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.

That’s exactly what Brazil is going to do today. The Brazilian Senate will vote later today to agree to a trial on the lower House’s impeachment charges, which will automatically result in Dilma’s suspension from the presidency pending the end of the trial.

Her successor will be Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB party (pictured, above). So unlike impeachment in most other countries with a presidential system, impeachment here will empower a person from a different party than that of the elected President. In this particular case, the person to be installed is awash in corruption: accused by informants of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme, he was just found guilty of, and fined for, election spending violations and faces an 8-year-ban on running for any office. He’s deeply unpopular: only 2% would support him for President and almost 60% want him impeached (the same number that favors Dilma’s impeachment). But he will faithfully serve the interests of Brazil’s richest: he’s planning to appoint Goldman, Sachs and IMF officials to run the economy and otherwise install a totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team (composed in part of the same party – PSDB – that has lost 4 straight elections to the PT).

None of this is a defense of PT. That party – as even Lula acknowledged to me in my interview of him – is filled with serious corruption. Dilma, in many critical ways, has been a failed president, and is deeply unpopular. They have often aligned with and served the country’s elite at the expense of their base of poor supporters. The country is suffering economically and in almost every other way.

But the solution to that is to defeat them at the ballot box, not simply remove them and replace them with someone more suitable to the nation’s richest. Whatever damage PT is doing to Brazil, the plutocrats and their journalist-propagandists and the band of thieves in Brasilia engineering this travesty are far more dangerous. They are literally dismantling – crushing – democracy in the world’s fifth-largest country. Even The Economist – which is hostile to even the most moderate left-wing parties, hates PT and wants Dilma to resign – has denounced impeachment as “a pretext for ousting an unpopular president” and just two weeks ago warned that “what is alarming is that those who are working for her removal are in many ways worse.” Before he became an active plotter in his own empowerment, Temer himself said last year that “impeachment is unthinkable, would create an institutional crisis. There is no judicial or political basis for it.”

the new president of brazil

NYTimes |  The new Brazilian president’s first pick for science minister was a creationist. He chose a soybean tycoon who has deforested large tracts of the Amazon rain forest to be his agriculture minister. And he is the first leader in decades to have no women in his cabinet at all.

The government of President Michel Temer — the 75-year-old lawyer who took the helm of Brazil on Thursday after Dilma Rousseff was suspended by the Senate to face an impeachment trial — could cause a significant shift to the political right in Latin America’s largest country.

“Temer’s government is starting out well,” Silas Malafaia, a television evangelist and author of best-selling books like “How to Defeat Satan’s Strategies,” wrote on Twitter.

“He’ll be able to sweep away the ideology of pathological leftists,” Mr. Malafaia added of a conservative lawmaker whom Mr. Temer chose as education minister.

For more than a decade, Brazil has been an anchor of leftist politics in the region, less strident than the governments in countries like Venezuela and Cuba, but openly supportive of them and committed to its own platform of reducing inequality.

But parts of Latin America are now drifting away from the left after elections in neighboring countries like Argentina and Paraguay. Mr. Temer seems to be embracing a more conservative disposition for his government as well, with the country’s business establishment pressuring him to privatize state-controlled companies and cut public spending.

when bartenders and short-order cooks can't support the shopping malls we provided for them...,

dailyimpact |  It’s a picture that’s worth a thousand choruses of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Here in the Seventh Straight Successful Year of the Recovery from the Great Recession, tucked into a corner of the Arizona Desert, is a line of parked Union Pacific locomotives. It was discovered on Google Earth, so it is, as they say, visible from space. There are 292 of them, baking in the sun like so many dinosaur skeletons, in a line stretching almost five miles. They, and the people who used to run them, are now “excess capacity” for one of the country’s largest freight haulers. In this, the Seventh Straight Successful Year of the Great Recovery.

No one should be surprised. But even when you know that trade — the buying and selling of stuff — has been slowing down all over the world for years, it is startling to see such stark, graphic evidence that we are all in deep trouble.

billingsgazette | GILLETTE — Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad officials say they are keeping about 150 locomotives and rail engines stored near Gillette because of decreased demand.

BNSF spokesman Matt Jones said the rail engines and two sets of box cars remain at the railroad's yard in the Donkey Creek area because of a downturn in rail shipping.

The problems can be attributed to the decline in the coal sector. The passage of the federal Clean Power Plan has pushed power plants away from coal and toward natural gas.

The impact can be seen in the Powder River Basin, as nearby coal companies Alpha Natural Resources and Arch Coal have filed for bankruptcy.

Jones said the declining demand for transportation has hit several sectors, not just coal.

inforum |  FARGO - An economic downturn involving a variety of commodities across various parts of the United States has resulted in BNSF Railway parking about 45 of its train locomotives at the railroad’s train yard just off 12th Avenue North west of the North Dakota State University campus.

“Customers’ volumes across a broad spectrum of commodities have come down somewhat from their prior estimates,” said Amy McBeth, a spokeswoman for BNSF. “As a result, we are strategically storing locomotives in some yard locations across our network.”

McBeth said the locomotives will remain stored until traffic volumes warrant returning them to service.

Quarterly profits for Forth Worth-based BNSF, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, fell 25 percent in the first quarter of 2016.

The railroad has been cutting staff in the wake of a changing economic environment that includes low energy prices, the strong dollar and other factors, McBeth said.

“Nationwide, while petroleum products volumes are down, coal is down, too, as are a number of other commodities,” she added.

 

newsok |  BNSF Railway has parked dozens of its locomotives at a storage yard north of downtown Oklahoma City over the past several weeks as slowing traffic demand has left the units idle.

The engines parked along the east side of Interstate 235 north of NW 23 are from BNSF trains throughout the country, company spokesman Joe Sloan said.

"We have a reduced amount of freight traffic now, and that storage point was available," he said.

Sloan said there is no timeline as to when the locomotives are expected back on the rails.

$100 Million Boondoggle - We're in the Big Time World Now...,

thepitch |  "The best thing that’s happened so far is that all the cones are gone.” 

This is what Michael Smith — chef and co-owner of the Michael Smith and Extra Virgin restaurants, in the Crossroads — tells me when I call him to follow up on our last conversation about KC’s streetcar system. 

That doesn’t sound much more upbeat than what he and four other high-profile restaurateurs said a couple of winters ago (“Sauce on the Tracks,” January 6, 2015). At the height of streetcar construction, Smith and his wife and business partner, Nancy Smith; Anton Kotar, of Anton’s Tap Room; Martin Heuser, of Affäre; and Howard Hanna, of the Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange, spoke to The Pitch about how the project was affecting their respective bottom lines. The port-a-potties, the jackhammering, those countless cones — the sights and sounds of a city’s costly transit project were repelling customers, said that roundtable. 

A year and a season later, the first Kansas City streetcar line in more than half a century is finally about to begin taking passengers. With a splashy opening for the 2.2-mile route set to start Friday, May 6 (coinciding with the Crossroads’ monthly First Friday art openings), and carry on through the weekend, I was checking back in with the Smiths, Kotar, Heuser and Hanna. Their businesses had survived. What now, though? Are they confident that the free-to-ride streetcar will bring fresh bustle to the sidewalks outside their doors — and send hungry people inside?

“I’m not sure that the streetcar, once it’s in full service, will have any impact on our business,” Michael Smith says. “But there’s a lot of stuff happening in the Crossroads — new hotels, a lot of activity. They have these same streetcars in Prague. We’re in the big-time world now.”

on the deck of the Titanic, no one is weaker and more expendable than elderly pensioners...,

democracynow |  Well, Amy, we all know what Ponzi growth is—right?—what a Ponzi scheme is. It’s when you pretend to be growing your income on the basis of unsustainable debt. And the more debt you take, the more you pretend that you’re growing. But then you have to have even more unsustainable debt in order to maintain this illusion. Now, what is Ponzi austerity? Once these bubbles burst, the only way you can continue to pretend that you’re solvent is through even more debt, that will be utilized in order to repay or to pretend to repay the previous debts. And if you’re going through a period of belt tightening to impress creditors that you’re doing the right—the good Protestant thing, which is, you know, to be parsimonious and to tighten your belt, you have austerity, which continuously reduces national income, because when you reduce pensions, when you reduce investment, when you reduce all the determinants of aggregate demand, income of the nation shrinks. And you keep tightening that belt through more pension cuts, more reductions in public health and so on, and public education, and you keep on taking new unsustainable loans in order to pretend that you’re not insolvent. That’s Ponzi austerity for you.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanis Varoufakis, we’re going to continue this conversation after break. Professor Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece, now teaching economic theory at the University of Athens. His new book is titled And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

having told you the way forward, I acknowledge that the weak suffer what they must...,

serendipity |  The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in 1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it. The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability.

Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break with this policy framework — and brought the first visible signs of the fission of the nation-capital bond. 

The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology. Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states. Indeed, Western nations — with their environmental laws, consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory "interference" — were a burden on corporate growth. Having been successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world system.

The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce. Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health, safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.

Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s, genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result. Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.

As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.

In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that "assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that the Clinton doctrine handily enables the US president to intervene when and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call for an intervention.

In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't "competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia in the 1990s) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."

Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's "The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.

The management of discontented societies

The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how society worked, and generally approved of how things were going. Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring. Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and the government could then carry out its plans as it intended, "responding" to the programmed public will.

The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix. Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws. Such means of control were identified and have since been largely implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of social-control techniques.

The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos — where the adverse consequences of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated — have literally become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified shootings are commonplace.

So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise of prison slave labor (see "KGB-ing America.", Tony Serra, Whole Earth, Winter, 1998). The Rubicon has been crossed — the techniques of oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to the core.

In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble cops are fighting a war out there in the streets — and you can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.

The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when necessary — as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during the anti-WTO demonstrations there, and as is suggested by executive orders that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.

Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control — standard practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has become the front-line defense — the matrix version of divide and rule.

I hope this was recorded...,

MIT |  This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’

Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist, titled: "Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?" (2016) that engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis”  in Europe and beyond.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Active Learning and SMART Community Our Only Way Forward

There has been no rational attack on the problems of sustainability within the local or national political dialogue. No candidate has come to grips with the concrete technical, interpersonal and political challenge of reducing our energy and material resource consumption while maintaining a satisfactory-to-improving quality of life for all U.S. citizens. 

Our polity is our way of life, and the American polity is an ecosphere-destroying monstrosity due in large measure to our living memory history of in-group/out-group racist social allergy and the resulting flight into ridiculous and grossly inefficient suburban sprawl. There is, after all - short of catastrophic depopulation - only one way for your species to go within its ecosphere, and that way is toward intensive urban densification and concentration. We will either all learn to get along, or, we will perish in the process of our continuing inability to do so.

If we take a 1000 year viewpoint, it becomes obvious that our present living styles can not continue and ultimately the shortage of raw materials will force us to change. This means that conservation must be a principle activity and we need to start now. Geometry and values are the principle factors defining how we adapt to energy and resource scarcity. We must change our current living arrangements and interpersonal/social values so as to make the optimal use of what is available. 

“Walking to work will save the earth” must become our national anthem. Reforming society into very dense urban monads containing buildings and equipment needed for most activities that will require almost no transportation will save large amounts of energy. 

Large amounts of heating and cooling energy can be saved by living in apartment buildings that are heated and cooled by solar, wind, and biomass. This is much easier to do in apartments than in houses. Furnaces are obsolete and must be replaced by engines. Cogeneration and advanced biological and nanomaterial manufacturing must be used to save energy. Biomass can be used in buildings by direct combustion and steam, by gasification and biodigestion. 

We need to consider solar mirrors as a means of powering buildings because they not only generate electricity but can heat water, space, distill alcohol and other chemicals, dry crops, and process sewage. Windmills and sterling motors that compress air or refrigerants should be developed as a means of powering buildings.  We need to reduce our national consumption of energy from 97 quads to 50 quads and our individual consumption from 360 million btus/yr to 100 million btus/yr. 

We can start this by focusing on renovating our educational system to do a better (more Cuban) job of producing highly literate, highly educated, culturally enriched, and selflessly civic-minded scholar-athlete-citizens. Our military led the way toward social and interpersonal change. But the military is no longer a viable driver for the changes we need, having been co-opted for profit and predatory exploitation generations ago. 

Sports and cultural production are the most integrated and meritocratic activities broadly available to the public in America. It is precisely here, in these meritocratic social activities that we find the common bond of civic identity which transcends petty and divisive sexual, racial, and gender identity squabbles - also nearly exclusively exploited for profit and political gain here-to-date.

Only when we reformat our public schools, re-centering them on active learning and meritocratic cultural enrichment in the arts and sports as primary vehicles for identity and individuation - and simultaneously - employ active learning methods and current technology tools to enrich and accelerate student acquisition of knowledge and skill in science and letters,  will we find ourselves once again on the path forward.  Failing this, we are already well along the path of an evolutionary blind alley and violent, catastrophic depopulation this way comes...,

buying a neighborhood is the most important thing you can do for your kid...,

WaPo |  "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we have segregated schools."

If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago — that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods. School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose some of their value.

Politically, the two topics that most enrage voters are threats to property values and local schools.  So either of these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.

But, Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more about inequality and segregation.

the urgent business of where 19 transexuals use the toilet trumps trade, jobs, criminal justice, etc...,

WaPo |  On Monday, there was a remarkable moment at the Department of Justice: two women of color who had personally experienced the pain of prejudice walked to the podium to announce the Justice Department’s discrimination lawsuit against the state of North Carolina.

The two top Justice Department officials – one the daughter of Indian immigrants and the other the granddaughter of a “dirt poor” sharecropper and minister in the deep South – linked the growing controversy over transgender access to restrooms in North Carolina to the civil rights battles of the 1960s.

“It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations,” said Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, a native of North Carolina, in perhaps the most impassioned speech she has given since taking the reins of the Justice Department last year. “We have moved beyond those dark days, but not without pain and suffering and an ongoing fight to keep moving forward. Let us write a different story this time.”